At first glance, what Grandfather did above looks a lot like "copy/paste" coding, and maybe even "OOP for OOP's sake". But you don't have to look all that closely at his code, and you don't have think very long about the domain of the problem, to understand that Grandfather is actually making a smart investment up front, in anticipation of what could end up being a fairly diverse set of problems to be addressed.

I'm all for using expedients whenever possible, and I would have probably used BrowserUK's approach myself, if I knew that there was just the one question to be answered (and quickly) about the data. But putting in a foundation for future work is not "assinine" [sic].